surreal

Interesting. I don't think Ben ever rode a bike with left-hand drive. =P Further, i don't think that fixie folk on conversions trying to go LHD are quite as innovative as Franklin or AG Bell. It should be obvious that reverse-threaded pedals on left crank-arms were invented by somebody, but I was surprised when I found out who. Torn from sheldon's page:

"Direction
The right pedal has a normal thread, but the left pedal has a left (reverse) thread.

The reason for this is not obvious: The force from bearing friction would, in fact, tend to unscrew pedals threaded in this manner. It is not the bearing friction that makes pedals unscrew themselves, but a phenomenon called "precession".

You can demonstrate this to yourself by performing a simple experiment. Hold a pencil loosely in one fist, and move the end of it in a circle. You will see that the pencil, as it rubs against the inside of your fist, rotates in the opposite direction.

Ignorant people outside the bicycle industry sometimes make the astonishing discovery that the way it has been done for 100 years is "wrong." "Look at these fools, they go to the trouble of using a left thread on one pedal, then the bozos go and put the left thread on the wrong side! Shows that bicycle designers have no idea what they are doing..."

Another popular theory of armchair engineers is that the threads are done this way so that, if the pedal bearing locks up, the pedal will unscrew itself instead of breaking the rider's ankle.

The left-threaded left pedal was not the result of armchair theorizing, it was a solution to a real problem: people's left pedals kept unscrewing! I have read that this was invented by the Wright brothers, but I am not sure of this.

Note! The precession effect doesn't substitute for screwing your pedals in good and tight. It is very important to do so. The threads (like almost all threads on a bicycle) should be lubricated with grease, or at least with oil. " http://www.sheldonbrown.com/gloss_p.html


loctite might help prevent the original problem, but it might lead to others down the road. Appropriate technology= getting the correct cranks, if you really want to do this. (But why would you really want to do this?)

You may be onto something there; the french bikes do seem to operate under a different set of rules. However, even the *french* have been using reverse-thread pedals on the left crankarms, because the forces that unscrew pedals are different from the ones that might (theoretically) mess with BB cups.

Bottom line: if you can't buy a few sugino XD bits for your super-hawt french fixie (@30bucks? maybe more with shipping?), you don't really, truly want a tricked-out LHD fix.

And, I don't blame ya. =P
-rob